Advertisement " , ) . -- THE NE-W YORKER . OCTOBER 23-26 FOUR GREAT NIGHTS OF ENTERTAINMENT presented by BANANA REPUBLIC The New Yorker prings to San Francisco a series of signature programs drawn from the pages of the magazine. Sign up now to receive the early word on programming. Visit newyorkernights.com. sponsored by ßOMBAY SAPPHIR , :.. .' . ..... ,. ,. IN FIN I T I BERINGER The New Yorker will donate its ticket proceeds from the events to San Francisco-based charities. Artists: Ian Falconer Marina Sagona, Max Miller A CR.ITIC AT LAR.GE THE DOUBLE MAN Why Auden is an indispensable poet of our time. BY ADAM GOPNIK W hen W. H. Auden died, in 1973, no one would have imagined that thirty years later he would come back as the poet of another age, our own. He seemed miserable and seedy then, having made a failed return to Oxford after two decades on St. Marks Place in the East Village and become the model of a mod- em poet who had lost his way and got stranded on an island of his own pet phrases. The obituaries, though large, mostly quoted his lyrics from the thirties: ''fu I Walked Out One Evening" or "Lul- laby" ("Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm . . .") or, more brazenly, the line from "September 1, 1939"-"We must love one another or die" -which he had pointedly cut from his own canon. The body of poetry that he produced after his emigration to Amer- ica, in 1939, was pretty poorly regarded- Philip Larkin, once a disciple, had written a brisk, common-sense dismissal of it as "a rambling intellectual stew," while the greatest American reviewer, Randall J ar- rell, another apostate, referred to the later Auden manner as one of a man "who has turned into a rhetoric mill grinding away at the bottom of Limbo." Yet, at the beginning of the new cen- tury; he is an indispensable poet. Even people who don't read poems often turn to poetry at moments when it matters, and Auden matters now: In the eighties, his lyric "Stop All the Clocks" became the elegy of the AIDS era, sold on bookstore counters, by the registers. In the nineties, Robert Hughes led off his memorable polemic against postmodernism "The Culture of Complaint" with a long, mar- velling quote from Auden's Christmas or- atorio, "For the Time Being," where the I liberal King Herod mourns the loss of ra- tional consensus in the face of feckless sec- tarianism. In the past year, Auden has been everywhere, by the sheer force of popular will. Two of his lyrics about suffering and I confusion-"Musée des Beaux Arts" and I "September 1, 1939"--sprangtorenewed life after last September 11th as the em- bodiments of our mood, posted on Web sites and subway walls. Even fashion models, and not just fashion models, now name their sons Auden, as they might ten years ago have called them Dylan, and pose with them on the cover of Võgue. The odd thing is that Auden's poems are often saying the reverse of what we have now decided to hear. "Stop All the Clocks" was written as a jaunty, Noël Coward-like ironic pastiche of a mourn- ing song, unmoored from grief-no more meant to be taken seriously as an elegy ("Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone"?) than "You're the Top" is to be taken seriously as a love poem. The quote from "For the Time Being" that Hughes used so effectively to warn against the mess the world can become in the ab- sence of rationality was first meant to demonstrate the opposite-the rational voice, after all, is Herod's as he orders the massacre of the innocents. And "Sep- tember 1, 1939," far from being a call to renewed conscience after a period of drift, is actually a call to irony and apolit- ical retreat, a call not to answer any call. But, past a certain point, poets can't be misread, not by an entire time, no more than an entire family can misread a father: the homecoming noises in the hallway are the man; the accumulated impression is the poet. What matters is the sound he makes. Auden's emotional tone is our tone, even if his meanings are not always our meanings. That Auden tone, the one that mat- ters most now, was made in New York between 1939 and 1948, when Auden came to this city and made it his home. In those nine years, he underwent an ex- traordinary transformation, which im- plicated every line on his face. He entered as the smooth-faced mysterious druid of the English industrial landscape, the Marxist lyricist who spellbound a gen- eration, and he emerged as the boozy; creased, gaffiÙous Auden who lasted. He